Policy Management for Your Business

When it comes to telecommunications, businesses want to ensure that they are receiving the best value for their money. Managing this in a global business environment can be a complex task because there’s a need to ensure that policies are correctly enforced 24 hours a day in a variety of locations.

That’s where a policy manager comes in.

It’s a software tool designed to help complex organizations manage their telecommunications networks in a simpler manner. The idea is to create real-time data from the network and then examine that data to automatically enforce policies on the network. The concept may sound familiar as it’s something that’s been done by software in the past. However, in most cases that software has functioned as an additional network component and not been fully integrated into the network.

Policy Manager – The Traditional Approach

The issue caused by bolting on the software to the network is that it results in delays to information flow. That means that analysts and policy enforcement teams are always a few steps behind the real scenario. This can lead to substantial delays in enforcing policy and create additional costs and possibly cause lost opportunities within the environment when policies are not applied correctly.

Policy Manager – An Integrated Approach

By integrating the policy manager directly into the network, this problem can be easily resolved. The software is then able to connect to all the core systems related to telecoms usage. For example, it can be configured to access your subscriber data, your charging data, etc. It then brings this data together in a coherent fashion to provide a high-level real time aggregation of exactly what’s happening on your telecommunications platform.

It also allows for direct policy management on an individual user basis. In effect you can tailor your policies to a substantially deeper level because the data you’re working with is a better reflection of the real position of usage. It’s capable of managing data in even the most complex environments where policies need to be applied based on a range of services (for example in quad-play networks) rather than a single service (for example mobile communications). This is a big advantage over the traditional approach where each individual service would need separate management and network managers would struggle to implement cohesive policies.

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